“We call for rapid innovation in creating infrastructure to monitor harms to youth from marijuana — in the context of legalization and fast-paced expansion of a commercial marijuana market,” says Weitzman, also a social-behavioral scientist in the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s.

Weitzman and Levy, director of the Adolescent Substance Abuse Program (ASAP) at Boston Children’s, argue that current monitoring systems aren’t good at capturing emerging trends and impacts of marijuana use. “With an accurate assessment of downstream consequences in hand, communities may decide to forgo legalization even where state law permits it, as has occurred in Colorado,” they write.

Mining of social media content and online crowd-sourcing communities for marijuana usage data, contextual information (like product potency, driving under the influence, and settings where marijuana is used) and outcomes (like missing class or unintentional injuries)

Engage users and stakeholders across social sectors to gather information on mental health, medical and school outcomes associated with marijuana use

Content analysis of communications to understand how opinions and beliefs about marijuana disseminate across social networks

Weitzman is currently testing a model that mines social media data to measure youth alcohol use. In the article, she and Levy cite tobacco as an example of the need for better monitoring:

With no real surveillance system, it took more than 50 years to firmly establish that smoking tobacco causes lung cancer despite the very strong relationship. Delayed response afforded opportunity for youthful cohorts of smokers to mature, to devastating health consequences and profound social cost.